


How Sharper Than

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s10e06 Extremis, Frisking, Knives, Nardole's there too, Other, The Vault (Doctor Who), indulging fantasies about knives while using safety scissors, safety scissors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27318715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: The Doctor had searched Missy for weapons, and he let her keep the knife anyway.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	How Sharper Than

He knows about the knife; he has done since...forever, since the beginning, this beginning. To say that he’d frisked her when he’d brought her to the vault—“ ‘m all floppy,” she’d slurred unhelpfully—doesn’t sound right, isn’t the right word to describe the nature of what he’d done, but in a purely physical sense, it would be accurate.

He’d searched her for weapons. He doesn’t know why she didn’t use them against her captors. More than once, he has wondered if it was because the execution planet was meant as a trap for him.

Watching her, brought lower, somehow, sat at the piano or in an armchair, than she had been when on her knees facing her death, he doesn’t believe it. The Master’s traps don’t look like this. No one’s traps could look like this.

But at the time, he’d been half convinced. He’d rigged the device anyway, shuddering at each element in the mechanism as he’d decoupled it from the primary power core, unable to help learning how it worked nonetheless, committing it to memory because—just in case. In the grey morning, he’d gone through with the charade: the boat, like Charon’s gondola; the rock’n’roller in a tattered coat in the underworld; the chill mist, the mercy killing, no looking back. In fact, all the time he was watching, trying to see, trying to pick apart the ploy. It was no use. Everything was a performance for Missy. Impossible to tell the difference between a ruse and a game and her true feelings. 

He’d made the promise. 

If there was any question as to whether the good name on which he’d vowed still meant anything to him, the people who stood in witness didn’t ask it, and anyway he’d made a farce of their solemn duty with his tricks and word games: Missy had lived. They had run away.

Into the vault, then, Missy a dead weight, as though he had actually allowed an execution again. He’d touched her as sparingly as he could, carrying her across the water, letting Nardole do the bulk of the work, her body like a sack of grain between them. He’d thought she would object to the indignity. He’d thought she would wriggle out of their grasp and walk over the threshold on her own two feet.

Instead, they’d set her down on the bare floor, dripping onto its cold and porous surface from their trouser legs and coat hems. Missy’s eyelids fluttered. Her chest rose and fell. He could feel the drumming of her hearts, subterranean, her pulses thrumming through her body and the vault and the air like some distant speech heard through the flesh and not by the ear.

“Can you give us a minute?” he’d asked Nardole. He was still crouched on one knee by Missy’s body. Maybe he could have looked up and met his eyes. At the time, maybe it hadn’t seemed possible, or maybe it just hadn’t occurred to him. 

Nardole had been obliging, his gentle, “of course, sir, but only a minute; we do have to go,” though soft, louder than the Doctor’s own voice had been.

Anyone would think he _had_ pulled the lever on Missy, that the body they’d borne into the vault wasn’t living, breathing, and warm.

“Missy?” he’d ventured once they were alone, determined to keep his voice steady, aiming for the conspiratorial twinkle he’d managed in front of all the people. He achieved a cautious hiss. Inquisitive caution. Good enough. A few minutes ago, she’d all but winked along with him, teasing, teasing; death is for other people, isn’t that right, dear?

Was she playing now? Was she waiting for her chance to run?

He checked her wrist—no vortex manipulator. Unadorned, it was too vulnerable in his grip. He’d put his hand halfway into her jacket before rational thought grabbed him and held him still, jerked him away from her with a suppressed gasp at the boundary he’d been about to cross. Then he broke the interdiction anyway, like he was breaching a security system: avoiding lasers, barely breathing.

No handheld device either, nothing obvious.

The outside pockets were easier, and he was almost casual reaching into them, but there was only endless nothing in them; the guards must have taken everything off her, or she had jettisoned it all, or lost it, when she knew that they would capture her.

After that, the Doctor had sat back on his heels, contemplating. But in for a penny, in for a pound— 

Of course, she’d opened her eyes when he had his fingers tangled in the bow of her boot laces. He was trying to loosen them without looking. He was trying to search for holsters and sheaths and hidden things without disturbing even one centimetre of her skirts.

“Doctor! You only had to ask!” Missy said breathily, richly, her suddenly open eyes as inescapable as hands grabbing his.

He could feel the small muscles around his eyes and mouth working, his fingers twisting spasmodically in failing attempts to detach themselves from her boot. Then, between one hitched, too-quick breath and the next, he was free, and scrambling away, back, up, onto his feet and stumbling and finding the vault wall too soon, not enough space, not nearly enough space, because she was on her feet too, as quick as ever.

And then Missy was reaching out dizzyly, swaying, one gloved hand extended, and he could do that, he could touch her like that, even after this awful trespass; and so he did, and she fell—swooned—against him, and he stood like that for a long moment until he could bring himself to look at her and realised that her eyes had closed again.

He shook her and thought of letting her drop, because it might still have been a lie. Eventually, he slid them together to the floor, his back pushing on the wall for leverage.

Her head lolled against his, mashing her ear against his jaw. In a flash, he had the certainty he wanted: Missy wasn’t faking it. Her mind was doing something slow and rhythmic and only falteringly, intermittently present. Her body was cool, cooling, drawing into itself and reallocating resources. Healing. 

Her weight was exactly her weight, resting on his shoulder and his side and his thigh, neither lightened by restraint nor exaggerated by her pressing herself against him. It was an unaccustomed honesty. The Doctor watched her wander up and down through levels of consciousness, and he permitted time to pass like this. He didn’t move.

At some point, the hard thing digging into his arm began to cause him discomfort. 

He knows about the knife. He knows, too, that he should have taken the knife off her that day. He’d traced the long ridge down the seam of her sleeve while she slept under his arm, and he had left it there and pretended he didn’t know. He will not take the knife away.

Sometimes, he thinks he forgets about its existence. Sometimes, he imagines that she has. They’ve lived long enough; it is possible to forget.

Sometimes, he likes to remember it, the third bone in her arm, hidden straight and true and unforgiving. She could cut and stab him with it and watch him bleed out on her floor, her eyes dead and cold. Spilled from him and onto the concrete, his blood would turn cold too, like dim, grey water. Never, never does she do it, never does she hint that she ever could, no matter the provocation. 

There are times when he would like… Well. It isn’t that he deserves… 

The sharp certainty of the knife in his back, tempered to her body. Arching from the inescapable pressure, so precise he almost doesn’t feel it. Only knowing what has happened—finally, after so much waiting—when he looks at her. No blood on her hands. Only on his. 

Or the sting of the cut, a very long cut splitting his skin. Tracing his thigh, skirting his pelvis, Missy up in his jacket, opening the panels to access his chest, her hand in his clothes, the knife’s incision everywhere she’s touched.

The Doctor wants her to hold him while she cuts him. His hearts would race and she could murmur soothing things and he’d bury his face in her shoulder, acknowledging that he no longer knows the difference between granting forgiveness and seeking it, holding and being held, punishment and redemption. And nor between the kept and the saved. 

The Doctor will bleed, and he wants Missy to dip her fingers in his blood, which will show red only against her skin, and which will turn to gold, to light in her hand, and hold him there, as he has held her and her life and the weapon of it, the weapon it’s been since forever, since the first beginning.

“What?” she asks, pausing with the safety scissors poised over her magazine. 

He shakes his head, looks down, rips a page with the template for a pink pig confetti cannon out of the issue he’s taking apart. The signature comes loose with a satisfying pop around the staples. 

“I can kill you with blunt scissors as well as with sharp,” she notes demurely. “Better, as a matter of fact.”

“But you won’t.”

“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” 

Missy smiles, a smile that doesn’t reach her teeth. Nevertheless, it has knives in it.

**Author's Note:**

> [The Doctor wears his Blue Peter Badge like an anorak.](https://youtu.be/9kAQ7l-FDdM)


End file.
